🔗 Share this article

Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen automated sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding construction modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It could appear playful, but the installation honors a little-known biological feat: experts have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that generates the possibility to alter your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she states.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine structure is among various features in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the culture, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also draws attention to the people's struggles associated with the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the long entry incline, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of skins trapped by utility lines. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense layers of ice develop as changing temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried containers of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide manually. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This costly and laborious process is having a severe influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others submerging after falling into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The sculpture also highlights the sharp divergence between the industrial view of power as a commodity to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate power in creatures, individuals, and the environment. This venue's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be leaders for clean sources, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, livelihoods, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Extractivism has adopted the language of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just striving to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her kin have themselves clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara produced a four-year series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For many Sámi, visual expression appears the exclusive domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|